-The Telegraph New Delhi: The National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes has ordered the Uttar Pradesh government to pay Rs 1 lakh as compensation to the family of a tribal maidservant from Jharkhand, whose body was found hanging at her employer's Kaushambi home in Ghaziabad this June. The commission issued this directive after a detailed hearing of the case in which senior officials of Jharkhand state anti-trafficking unit and UP...

-PTI BHUBANESWAR: Accepting most of the demands made by Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik for cyclone victims, the Centre today said it would extend similar flexibility under MGNREGA as given to calamity-ravaged Uttarakhand in July this year. "I am more than pleased to extend the same flexibility that we have given to Uttarakhand in July 2013 to Odisha which has gone through a severe calamity in the past few weeks," Union Rural...

-The Times of India CHANDIGARH: The Haryana government is busy digging out old files to line up chargesheets against whistleblower IAS officer Ashok Khemka, who earned the government's wrath after he cancelled the mutation of a land deal between Congress chief Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law Robert Vadra and realty giant DLF last year. Days after Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda approved two chargesheets against Khemka, the government has decided to seek his...

-The Hindu Denying basic amenities to residents of ‘unrecognised' slums is an affront to their dignity; resettling them fails to address their concerns and is unviable financially Since 2005, the Central government has given significant amounts of money to the States to improve conditions for the country's urban poor, first under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and more recently through the slow-moving Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY). Unfortunately, very few...

-The Hindu ‘No land to rehabilitate 2.5 lakh people in submergence zones' The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) has urged the central government to halt the mega Sardar Sarovar Project at its present height of 122 meters which will bring the requisite benefits without uprooting thousands of rural and tribal population from displacement. During their two-day agitation that concluded at Jantar Mantar here on Thursday, representatives of the displaced families led by Medha Patkar...